A novel equivalent staggered-grid finite-difference scheme and its optimization strategy for variable-density acoustic wave modelling

Compared with the standard staggered-grid finite-difference (FD) methods, equivalent staggered-grid (ESG) ones can significantly reduce the computational memory for acoustic wave modelling in the variable-density media. To further enhance the simulation efficiency and accuracy, one way is to optimize the FD coefficients, another way is to design new FD stencils. In this paper, we propose a modified ESG (M-ESG) scheme which can significantly accelerate the wavefield simulation process while preserving or even improving the modelling accuracy. We calculate the FD coefficients by approximating the temporal and spatial derivatives simultaneously based on time–space domain (TS-D) dispersion relation of the discrete wave equation. Our M-ESG scheme in the TS-D can maintain basically the same accuracy as the conventional ESG (C-ESG) one when the FD coefficients are derived by the Taylor-series expansion (TE) approach. Note that the TS-D dispersion relation is nonlinear with respect to the FD coefficients of the C-ESG scheme, so it is difficult to obtain the optimized FD coefficients for the discrete wave equation. However, we can minimize the L2-norm error of the dispersion relation based on our M-ESG scheme to implement a linear FD coefficients optimization strategy, which is easy and efficient. Comparisons with TE- and optimization-based C-ESG schemes demonstrate the accuracy, stability, and efficiency superiorities of our TE- and optimization-based M-ESG ones.